Okane Ball

The Oakland A’s are partnering up with the Tohoku Rakuten Eagles of the Japanese Pacific League:

The Rakuten Eagles announced Friday they have entered into a formal one-year partnership with the Oakland Athletics to strengthen both organizations’ baseball operation and management areas.

Under the agreement, Rakuten and the A’s will exchange coaching and strength-and-conditioning staff and also share information pertaining to player development and data analysis.

“We are very excited to have a working agreement with the Oakland Athletics,” Rakuten owner and president Toru Shimada said in press release. “The Athletics are very famous for using their own measurement to evaluate and develop players to create a winning organization.”

So, if you’re an Eagles fan, you can expect several decent regular seasons followed up by flameouts in the playoffs, an overhyped book to be written about your club, and then nearly a decade of misunderstandings about what the hell all the fuss was about in the first place. At the end of that process, the Eagles’ GM will turn his attentions to sumo and the owner will try to move the whole team out of Miyagi Prefecture to some place the shinkansen doesn’t even reach.

Shinkansen! Hahaha! When I went to visit my buddy in Japan, the only Japanese I knew was shinkansen. My buddy told me, just say shinkansen Nagoya and you’ll be just fine. Turns out, he was right and Japanese businessmen are creepy.